Category Archives: sunset

Wellington, briefly

I was on a press trip in China a few years ago and heard our host describe our fast-paced schedule as “to appreciate the flower from a gallop”. Sometimes I feel that most of my life is lived that way. Always at a gallop. Certainly my few days in Wellington, New Zealand, fit that description. It was the core of the Society of American Travel Writers Annual Convention and I had several roles to play: I was finishing my term up as Chair of the Society’s Freelance Council, I was on the professional development committee helping to coordinate a few of the sessions on photography, I was helping with the judging and presentation of the winners for a “photo shootout” that took place just prior to the convention, and I was trying to glean some benefit for myself in the form of getting some stock images and making contacts with various writers and PR professionals. Sounds like a lot to do in four days, doesn’t it? I’m not complaining, however. I’ve gotten a lot out of the organization and I’m happy to contribute when I can as well. That said, I might have overdone it a bit this time. Live and learn.

The shot on the left sums up much of my time in Wellington — I saw glimpses of the city through windows as I passed from meeting room to meeting room. These coffee cups were set up for the attendees of my Freelance Council meeting one morning and I was somewhat relieved to see the rain outside as I felt that I maybe wasn’t missing quite so much that day afterall. On the right is a quick shot of Andrew McCarthy, actor-turned-travelwriter, who was our keynote speaker at the first day’s lunch. The shot at the top of this post was made at a reception the night before. I had taken a camera — just in case — and was relieved to see that one side of our venue opened to the waterfront when a beautiful sunset appeared. I missed out on some hors d’oeuvres that evening, but got a few nice shots.

Our final dinner and the presentation of the photo shootout winners was held at the Te Papa museum, above. An amazing place. Wellington is one of those great cities that deserves much more time than I was able to give it on this trip. I hope to return one day soon to explore further and to reconnect with my new Wellingtonian friends. But, for the next few posts we’ll be off to the South Island of New Zealand…

Fire dance

The coming week is going to be busy and there’s a good chance that I won’t have an opportunity to post anything so I’ll leave you with a fun shot today, just in case you end up having to stare at it all week. This one’s from an evening spent photographing fire dancers on the beach in Fiji. Not really an evening as much as a few minutes. There’s a brief period when the sky is dark enough but not too dark to balance with the fire and the light being cast by the fire. It’s fast and exhilarating — made more so by the bits of flaming material that occasionally gets flung in your direction. These guys and gals were amazing and put on quite a show.

For those of you interested in technical stuff, this was f/5.3 at 1/6th of a second. It was shot at 6:28. The entire shoot lasting from 6:17 until 6:37. 400 shots in 20 minutes (I’m glad I wasn’t having to change film). There are plenty more fun ones from this series which I’ll share in the coming weeks.

New project: Away.com

I’ve recently started working with Away.com, contributing slideshows on a variety of destinations for their travel website. I’ve delivered the first five, two of which have now been posted. This will be an ongoing project and I hope to continue to contribute many, many more. The image above is from the first to be posted. It’s a shot from Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. A gallery from the Greek island of Mykonos is also now online. To find a directory of my slideshows as they are posted, check out my bio page at Away.com. And — what the heck — book yourself a vacation while you’re there (but don’t expect me to pay for it!).

Frauenkirche in Dresden, Germany

Here’s an interior of the Frauenkirche that I mentioned in my last post. It’s hard not to be impressed by the effort that went into the reconstruction of this building when you look at the condition it was in from 1945 through the early 1990s. Beautiful inside and out, its dome is once again a prominent element of the already stunning Dresden skyline. I was lucky enough to have a room that overlooked this skyline and made good use of it at sunrise and sunset to capture a range of light both artificial and natural. Much of the skyline is lit in the evenings but the Frauenkirche seems to be lit the longest. I would start shooting while all the lights were on and continue as they winked out one by one until just that dome was lit. In the mornings, the whole thing was dark and silhouetted by the sunrise. Here are just a couple of shots from my window at the Maritim — sunset and sunrise:

Louisville, Kentucky

100916louisville_sotc

It’s been a while since I was on the road but I broke the dry spell with a quick trip to Kentucky over the past few days. A couple of assignments and a chance to do a little stock work took me to Louisville, Bardstown and Frankfort. The shot above was taken from a popular spot on the Indiana side of the Ohio River, looking back at the skyline of Louisville. Google maps and its satellite image feature was a great help in determining the best location. I added a 4-stop neutral density filter to cut down on the light and allow for a longer exposure (30 seconds) to get the river to turn silky. An aperture of f/11 gave me the star points on all the lights. They’re hard to see here but add a nice sparkle when you see the image full size.

I’m looking forward to a busy Fall. I believe it may be my favorite season although it always feels the shortest. When possible, I like to stretch it out by heading north for the early Fall color and then following it south. I’ll soon be starting this year’s season by heading to the North Shore of Lake Superior where the color is already beginning to peak (or so says the internet — what did we do without the web?). Hopefully I’ll catch it before it goes. Whether I’ll be able to get more Fall color is in question as other travels will take me elsewhere. Hopefully I’ll at least have a little time to enjoy the season at home. But, where ever I am, I’ll be looking for color.

Shooting local

100716campus_sotc

An assignment in my own home town has spurred a new personal project. When I moved to Lawrence, Kansas, a couple of years ago (has it been that long already?) I had intended to begin documenting the town photographically. While it seems like shooting in your own “back yard” would be the easiest thing in the world, it’s amazing how hard it can be to actually get out and do it. It’s too easy to get distracted by work, or mowing the lawn, or just plain every day life. When I’m on the road, I’m there to shoot and nothing else so it’s easy to stay focused. Even if the weather isn’t perfect, I’m out shooting because I only have limited time on location. When I’m home, it’s easy to say “maybe the light will be better tomorrow night”.

But nothing kicks me into action like a paying gig so, when an assignment came along for a story on some local civil war sites, it finally got me out of the house. First stop: the Eldridge hotel.

The Eldridge was burned down on multiple occasions during the years leading up to the civil war by pro-slavery raiders. Rebuilt each time, it is now a local landmark. I wanted a new angle so I contacted my friend, Doug, who offices across the street to see if he could get me on the roof. Being the great guy that he is, he did just that.

After popping off a few exposures of the KU campus (above) I settled into the shot I had in mind for the Eldridge. I wanted a long twilight exposure that mixed the sunset with the street lights below. I framed it up on the tripod and attached the release cord. Then it was just a matter of firing off a few shots every few minutes as the light faded and the shop lights came on.

In the end, I combined a few shots to get this one:

100716eldridge_sotc

Since I had shot several variations while locked down on the tripod, I could easily stack different exposures on layers and “paint in” elements of each using layer masks. The bulk of this image is one shot, from late in the set where the sky was darkest, but I did paint in some of the facade of the hotel from a shot prior to sunset to give more detail and balance the contrast a bit. I also painted in a few people on the sidewalk that appeared in various exposures.

I’m going to keep exploring other angles for this shot. The microwave tower behind the hotel is distracting (I could Photoshop it out but not for an editorial shoot – darn those ethics) and I would rather be on an angle with the hotel to add some dimension to it. Next time I’ll try shooting from street level, diagonally across from the building and see how that works.

It’s nice to have plenty of time for this project. Unfortunately, I can’t always spend so much time on each shot but, in this case, I’m looking at the assignment as an excuse to do some work I’d wanted to be doing for myself anyway. And it all goes into the stock files eventually.

Decade in review: 2002

100103adare_sotc

Continuing my review of the the past decade…

In 2002 I made my last major trip with with film — to Ireland. By this time I was shooting with a Nikon F100 and was just dabbling in digital with a Coolpix 990 (I’d actually had an Apple Quicktake earlier but never really found a way to use it professionally). I took around 250 or 300 rolls of film on this trip and — in those early post-9/11 days — begged for handchecks in Kansas City and again in Chicago to avoid x-ray exposure. I had already removed all of the film from their boxes but they were still in their transparent plastic canisters and kept together in a giant transparent ziplock bag. The handchecks involved taking each roll of film out of its canister and swabbing it before moving on to the next one. Repeat this process a couple hundred times and you’ll nearly miss your connection.

This was also my first international press trip (although still as a “spouse” to my writer-wife) and it was a whirlwind. We had left our home around 4:00 in the morning to catch our flight from KC to Chicago, then had an overnight flight to Dublin but neither of us were able to get any sleep on the plane. If I’m not mistaken, we were in the last row, center section, where the seats won’t recline because of the bulkhead that separates the cabin from the bathrooms. We landed around 7:00 a.m. and were picked up at the airport for a full day of touring. We ended up in Belfast that night, finally checking into our hotel around 11:30 p.m.

Thirty minutes later (and you can bet I was already sleeping) the fire alarm went off and we had to evacuate the hotel. I’ve never felt so sick in my life. The next morning we found out that the alarm had been triggered by a member of our group smoking a cigar in their room. They never came forward to identify themselves so the rest of the trip became like one of those murder-mystery trips with everyone trying to figure out who was on floor 7 and who had been seen with a lighter, etc., etc.

It was a brutal schedule but we were rewarded with scenes like this:

100103ireland_sotc

I shot this across the road from our hotel while everyone else was getting their luggage loaded on the bus. Or maybe we were getting off the bus and checking in — I don’t know. I just remember running across a pasture to stand on a fence and get this shot before the fire went out of the sky. One thing about press trips: you can always be certain that the best light will occur while you’re either on a bus or inside a restaurant. If you want to be out shooting in that light, you have to be quick. (I also learned on a later trip that you should always stay by the bus until you’ve seen your own suitcase get loaded… but that’s another story.)

I loved Ireland and we had pretty decent weather during the whole trip. We went into Northern Ireland, up the Antrim Coast to the Giant’s Causeway, and then cut across the island to the southwest to the Dingle Peninsula and the Ring of Kerry. I’ll leave you with a shot from the Dingle Peninsula. This is nice and saturated on it’s original Velvia but I thought I’d knock the color back a little this time and go for something a little more subtle. It’s nice to have that flexibility now, not only with digitally captured images but also with scans from old film shots.

100103dingle_sotc

Working the sunset, part 3

091018surf_sotc

One more from my Puerto Vallarta beach session. I was beginning to feel like I was shooting greeting cards — sunset over ocean surf, footprints in the sand, etc. — so I decided to play a little. Call it a game of “don’t drop your camera in the water”. As the waves would pull back from the beach, I would follow them out. Then, as they came rolling back in, I would hold the D700 down almost to the sand and run backward in front of the waves firing off exposures all the way. I wanted to capture some motion and convey the feeling of the waves coming in. I experimented with several shutter speeds — this was f/6.3 at 1/13th of a second. Strong sharpening in Photoshop helped bring out some interesting texture in the distant wave. Technically, I doubt there is much that’s “right” about this photo but I do feel that it captures the moment better than a static shot. At least that part of the moment that I was shooting for. In the end, whether it’s a success is up to the viewer.

Working the sunset, part 2

091018sunset_sotc

Just down the beach from (and a couple of minutes after) the last shot, I spotted this couple walking along the surf. The two figures added a sense of scale to the landscape — just imagine this shot without them and the beach would seem much smaller. Here it looks endless and as though the two have the entire coastline to themselves. Even with my Nikon’s white balance set to cloudy for more warmth, I ended up adding a warming filter to this image in Photoshop to create a more dramatic, monochromatic look.

Working the sunset, part 1

091018coast_sotc

On our third night in Puerto Vallarta we were treated to a dinner at the incredible Dreams Resort & Spa. The sun was setting as we toured the grounds so I took every opportunity to take advantage of the light. The rugged coastline, a wedding party dining on the beach, a band on stage overlooking the ocean… it was a productive few minutes that I truly appreciated after spending a fair amount of time in meetings for the past two days. Here’s one from that evening. More to follow.